Touch screens, gesture prompts and voice commands are rapidly replacing buttons and knobs in the newest cars and trucks.

Detroit Free Press Business Writer

Sometimes automation doesn’t improve an experience, and automakers intent on transforming a dashboard into an entertainment center may learn that lesson the hard way.

Think about those modern paper towel dispensers in corporate and public washrooms, said Tejas Desai, head of electronics for supplier Continental. You push a button or flash your hand over a blinking light. Sometimes the towel comes out. Sometimes it doesn’t.

“Great engineering, but it didn’t make it easier to get one,” Desai said at the WardsAuto Interior Conference in Dearborn. There is nothing wrong with grabbing a paper towel from a manual dispenser.

Touch screens, gesture prompts and voice commands are rapidly replacing buttons and knobs in the newest cars and trucks.

The goal is to make controls easier to use, without overwhelming the driver or boring him or her to distraction.

In 2011, four of every five crashes in the U.S. were because of distracted driving, said Tim Kelley, sales director for supplier TRW. They resulted in more than 3,300 deaths and 387,000 injuries.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has introduced new guidelines designed to prevent a driver’s eyes from leaving the road for more than two seconds at a time.

The guidelines may never become law, but regulators and insurers could consider them when setting insurance rates or safety rankings, said designer David Lyon.

The center console is where automakers focus a lot of time and cost, said Lyon, who worked on interiors for General Motors for five years and is now launching Pocketsquare, an interior-design consulting firm.

Lyon was working on GM’s infotainment systems when Ford came out with Sync and sophisticated steering wheel controls.

“We were very concerned,” he remembers. “People won’t use the center stack if steering wheel controls can do it for you.

The GM design team started questioning every button on the center stack. The 2012 Buick LaCrosse had more than 50 buttons and three knobs. The result of the exercise: the 2014 LaCrosse has fewer than 30 buttons and two knobs and a lot more steering wheel controls.

His new firm is working on ways to combine traditional knobs that can be used for multiple functions with hand gestures to command a touch screen.

Many designers are succumbing to the temptation to add complexity just because they can, Lyon said. Layers of menus and screens can leave a user lost and frustrated.

Lyon also stresses climate controls should be separate from the infotainment system and any controls below the instrument panel should be operated by feel without having to look.

He also is not a fan of voice commands requiring multiple specific instructions to a disembodied voice with a limited vocabulary.

“I don’t like talking to my car very much,” he said.

Ford’s head of interior design Amko Leenarts agrees the car’s interface with the driver is the “game-changing” part of the car, dictating the interior design around the technology. Leenarts said a car is not a mobile phone, but should be intuitive and intelligent.